


three micros

by geneeste



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Speculation, post 4x15
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-20
Updated: 2016-02-20
Packaged: 2018-05-21 23:33:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6062265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geneeste/pseuds/geneeste
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He remembers every single promise he’s made in his life, every promise he’s kept, and every one he’s broken. He tries to tally them, tries to balance them. If Felicity were there, she’d be able to come up with an equation that would make that kind of math work, but she isn’t there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	three micros

**Author's Note:**

> This is a rather sad story, just to warn you.
> 
> The title and each section heading came from Britt Ashley's poem of the same name, ["Three Micros."](http://theoffingmag.com/micro/three-micros-by-britt-ashley/) I’ve used them without permission, and will remove them if the author has an objection. The themes of those poems heavily influenced this work as well, so I definitely recommend reading it, it's lovely.

**_//advice on leaving your own crime scene gracefully//_ **

She’s been quiet all night.

For Oliver, who had fallen in love with her voice before he’d fallen in love with her, the quiet is stifling. The air in the lair fills up with her silence even as they all scramble to figure out where William is being held, and it holds court with an aching dread in his chest.

The others come and go, and he does too, but he’s tethered to her in a way that feels like torture, knowing that every time he leaves more of them is gone when he gets back.

Hours in, and there’s some progress. Felicity is relentless and focused, but her fingers tremble with fatigue; the edges of her face are pinched, and he knows from the rigidity in her shoulders that she’s in pain. She hasn’t left her chair, hasn’t moved away from her computer in hours, and he knows her back is the worse for it.

He starts to move forward, wanting to do something to relieve some of her discomfort, when Diggle shoulders past him. Diggle throws a searing look at him, a clear warning to stay away, and it stops Oliver in his tracks.

He can’t even summon the will to be angry. He knows what he’s done (is reminded every time he closes his eyes and sees the after image of her shocked face), and he almost feels grateful that Dig is protecting Felicity when he hasn’t.

(No matter what he’s told himself over the past months, hiding William had never been about protecting her, and that’s just another thing he has to live with now.)

So he stays put, frozen, watching while Dig brings her painkillers, while Laurel rubs Felicity’s back gently until they kick in. The hovering eases his guilt if not anything else, and it isn’t until the others clear out to follow a lead that he can bring himself to approach her.

He rolls a chair over next to her and sits down heavily in it. He doesn’t know how or where to start, and all he can really do is take in her beautiful profile and hope the words come.

They don’t.

Finally, she smiles, but it’s sad and he would rather she didn’t smile at all. “Don’t worry, Oliver, I’m here,” she says, voice rusty and faint. It only drives home how strange it is for her not to use it. “I’ll be here until we find him, until it’s over.”

She pauses, and it’s longest wait of his life, because she turns to him and her eyes tell him what he’s waiting for. “But then it’s over.”

His eyes start to burn, and it spreads to his throat and then his chest. It’s so overwhelming that he can’t answer her, can only nod his understanding.

She turns back to her computers. Distantly he hears the elevators doors open, hears Thea and Laurel talking as they return.

He waits, hoping for some kind of sign that he can fix this, fix them. But Thea and Laurel have enough time to set their gear down and check in, and Felicity still hasn’t moved.

He realizes that’s the only sign he’s going to get.

**_//i never met a house i didn’t want to burn down//_ **

After, Oliver spends a lot of time asking himself why.

Why did he wait? Why did he lie? Why did he take the risk, knowing how much he had to lose?

He feels like two men: the man he was before, the coward who wanted to fail, who knew he could never live up to anyone’s expectations; and the man he was after, the worthy man, the hero Felicity thought he was, the man who really could have had everything he wanted.

He doesn’t know which man he is now, but he thinks he knows which man Felicity sees.

He stays out of the loft as much as he can, and seriously considers selling it. Without Felicity in it, the space stays dark and full of bad memories, but it’s the stillness that bothers him the most. There’s no life to be found there.

He trains almost non-stop, falling back into an old routine that feels more mocking than therapeutic. It’s sheer avoidance - of Laurel’s accusing eyes, Thea’s sadness, Diggle’s disappointment, of _her_ \- and it’s a step backward, since the way forward seems so much harder to find.

That’s only half-true (and apparently he is not done lying, at least to himself), because all paths lead to Felicity. If he knew her less well, maybe he wouldn’t see how subtly she withdraws, even as she’s ever-present in the lair. He’s only a shadow to her now, which is ironic considering how much he craves her light, and she’s just a mask, put on for the team’s sake. If anyone else notices, they say nothing, and he’s lost any right to reach out for her.

He doesn’t even know that she’s had the biochip implanted until she doesn’t show up at the lair one night, and he panics. Diggle calms him down, but only partially, because this vital part of him was operated on, had her spine dangerously re-exposed, and he’d spent that time sweating on a mat instead of with her.

He’d promised late one night when she was first in the hospital that he’d never leave her side like that again, and thinking of that is all it takes. That night, he goes to the loft, sits on her side of the bed, and cries.

He remembers every single promise he’s made in his life, every promise he’s kept, and every one he’s broken. He tries to tally them, tries to balance them. If Felicity were there, she’d be able to come up with an equation that would make that kind of math work, but she isn’t there.

He knows which man he is now.

**_//persephone rewrites an introduction to ovid//_ **

The first week Felicity spends alone is the worst.

It isn’t getting acclimated to living by herself again, although that’s part of it. The high beds and counters and closets of her hotel suite make that difficult, but not impossible.

It’s the ‘almosts’ that haunt her. Waking to almost feeling Oliver in bed with her, and then remembering that he isn’t. Almost picking up the phone to ask him about dinner, and then remembering that she can’t. Almost feeling his lips on her neck. Almost wanting to tell him about her day. Almost wanting to forget anything ever happened, just so she can have him back, have it all back the way it was.

It takes a week for the feeling of being almost complete to fade, and for the grief to really settle in. She goes through the motions, of course; in the lair, with her team, even with Oliver. This is not her first heartbreak, and if her tears sound with the echoes of her mother and her seven year old self, at least they’re familiar. Old ghosts are better than new ones.

Those ghosts break her down every night, and she builds herself back up every day. Each wall is stronger than the last. She builds herself an entire fortress, so tall that no one but her can scale it.

When she goes into surgery again, it’s a wonderful and terrible relief. To see Donna worry about her physical health instead of her emotional one; to have John and Laurel and Curtis surround her for reasons that have nothing to do with the part of her that is missing, just the part of her that can be fixed.

And although she’s not fixed (not all of her, not really), it gets easier to pretend she is as the weeks go by. She takes her first independent steps in months - right into John’s waiting arms - and when he laughs, she laughs with him.

It’s there that she finds there are no almosts left. So when she meets Oliver’s bright eyes over John’s shoulder, it’s the first time the contact doesn’t make her flinch. It feels like she’s seeing him, the man he really is, for the first time in years, and it doesn’t hurt to realize that’s probably true.

Because she’s built herself a fortress, and she doesn’t know if she wants to live there alone.

But at least she knows she can.


End file.
